They Can't Do That to Our Brokers. Only We Can Do That to Our Brokers!

The Science section of the Times, this morning, has an interesting article on the evolutionary underpinnings of the desire to punish misbehavers.

The context, of course, is all the monkeyshines that have been going on on Wall Street and people's desire (need?) to find someone to punish for causing problems well-beyond those directly and knowingly involved.

Smart as we may be, though not as smart as we might think we are, the evolutionary psychology folks have some valuable observations about the need to punish. In the animal kingdom, as well as in tribes without formal systems of 'government,' there's a demonstrated and predictable trend for groups to punish people whose actions hurt the group as a whole.

Luckily, of course, there's also a demonstrated desire for cooperation and room for forgiveness.

The authors also cite a fair amount of game theory / experimental economics to support the rest of the article. It's a nice overview of the topic and well worth your 15 minutes if I do say so myself.

That's Using Yer Noggin

I came across an interesting article on marketing research this morning.

(Wow, that's a real attention-grabber.)

But it was cool because it reminded me of my past life, in a way.

When I was in school, we did some experiments trying to predict how generously people will behave in (admittedly contrived) economic experiments. In an anonymous, zero-sum game, we gave individuals a sum of money with the offer to share some, none, or all of the money with an unknown other.

For me, the most fun part of the exercise was setting up the design. But in our discussions, one of the pie-in-the-sky ideas one of our colleagues had was to try and measure the parts of one's brain that light up when they make generous versus non-generous decisions.

In and of itself, it might not tell one much, but it's related to this article about marketers who are starting to make a more practical use of the idea.

They're showing people advertisements and seeing which parts of the brain become active when they see different advertising images.

While the proof of these studies' value comes when people actually act (purchase) based on the ads, in an experimental setting people often have trouble either articulating their response or being honest about it.

This kind of research undoubtedly has scary possible repercussions, but it's also fascinating to me.